Sir Peter Brian Medawar

Sir Peter Brian Medawar
(1915 - 1987)

British zoologist who received (with Sir Macfarlane Burnet) the Nobel
Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1960 for the discovery of acquired
immunological tolerance when he found (1953) that adult animals injected
with foreign cells early in life accept skin grafts from the original
cell donor.
Medawar was born in Brazil, to which his parents had been transferred
on business. He attended Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he received
a degree in zoology. His involvement with transplant research began
in earnest in 1949, when Burnet advanced the hypothesis that during
embryonic life and immediately after birth, cells gradually acquire
the ability to distinguish between their own tissue substances and unwanted
cells and foreign material. Medawar lent support to this theory when
he found that fraternal cattle twins accept skin grafts from each other,
indicating that certain substances known as antigens "leak"
from the yolk sac of each embryo twin into the sac of the other. In
a series of experiments on mice, he produced evidence indicating that
each animal cell contains certain genetically determined antigens important
to the immunity process, because the recipient injected as an embryo
with the donor's cells will accept tissue from all parts of the donor's
body and from the donor's twin.

Medawar was professor of zoology at the universities of Birmingham
(1947-51) and London (1951-62), director of the National Institute for
Medical Research, London (1962-71), professor of experimental medicine
at the Royal Institution (1977-83), and president of the Royal Postgraduate
Medical School (1981-87). He was knighted in 1965 and awarded the Order
of Merit in 1981. Medawar's work resulted in a shift of emphasis in
the science of immunology from one that attempts to deal with the fully
developed immunity mechanism to one that attempts to alter the immunity
mechanism itself, as in the attempt to suppress the body's rejection
of organ transplants.

Medawar's works include The Uniqueness of the Individual (1957), The
Future of Man (1960), The Art of the Soluble (1967), The Hope of Progress
(1972), Life Science (1977), Pluto's Republic (1982), and his autobiography,
Memoir of a Thinking Radish (1986).